As Birds Bring Forth the Sun by Alistair MacLeod Page B

see.”
    I stood in the dusky yard, clutching Morag’s rope and waiting for the cherry-red and white bull with all the proper characteristics to come moaning forth, guided by a long wooden staff snapped into the ring of his nose. The breeding was almost leisurely and seemed thorough.
    “Well, this one is sure as hell in,” said MacDougall appreciatively. “No doubt about that. It should be all right.”
    After the bull was returned to his barn, I paid MacDougall the fee and he went into his house and then returned with a scribbler from which he tore a page. On it he wrote the date and Morag’s ownership and the fact that the breeding had occurred. He squinted his eyes in the dusky gloom and his hands were heavy and thick and unaccustomed to holding the stubby, yellow pencil. The funky odour of the bull’s perspiration and semen still hung about his hands and about the man himself.
    On the return we took a more travelled route and I was afraid as the darkness descended that we might be hit by a passing car or truck, but there was little traffic and we walked steadily and briskly. Although the route was longer, the return journey seemed much shorter than the outgoing one, the way return journeys often do. It was totally dark when we enteredour own yard and my father was in the barn where he seemed to be waiting.
    “How did you get along?” he asked.
    Again, I stated my story.
    “Do you think he got it in?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    I was so exhausted I could hardly stand. My father took Morag’s rope from me and led her into the barn. I went into the house and to bed without eating any supper. The mark from Morag’s rope still burned and circled redly about my hand and wrist.
    During the weeks that followed I played and replayed the events of the day within the privacy of my mind. I half hoped she had not conceived so that we could perhaps start over again; but I knew that if she had not, valuable time would already be lost and a September mating would at best produce a summer calf instead of a spring one; and that would perhaps be too late for the calf club’s organization. When the September dates came, I watched Morag anxiously but there were no signs. She grazed contentedly and lay in the sun by the sea and walked home placidly to be milked. She seemed at ease with everything.
    We went into September seriously then with a new round of activities: grain crops had to be harvested and preparations began for the digging of potatoes. School reopened and I was in the eighth grade. There were various fall fairs and exhibitions and our agricultural representative was everywhere. The first truckload of lambs was hauled away, bleating in the autumn sun, and the vines and tendrils of the vegetable gardens turned to russet and then to darker brown.
    In October Morag was still quiet and calm when the serious butchering and selling began, and by Halloween when the first snow fell she and the other animals entered the stables for their winter confinement.
    All winter I watched her anxiously and nervously, almost asif I were the young expectant father. When she began to grow heavier I moved her to a special stall so she might have more room, and sometimes I would place my hands and arms around her expanded girth, hoping I might feel life. When first I felt it, we were already out of the coldest depth of winter and into the erratic, gale-filled month of March. The calf became even more real then, as I lead her through my mind in various elegant postures and positions.
    Spring came early that year and although the nights remained cold, during the days the sun shone warmly down upon our backs as we went about repairing fences and replacing sluices and generally rectifying the ravages of winter. By May first the cattle were out during the day busily seeking the first adventurous blades of grass. During the first week the older more mature animals still sought the relative warmth of the stable at night while the